Shula's job: Turn the Tide around

Mike Shula begins his head-coaching career in a storied program

September 19, 2003|By Melissa Isaacson, Tribune staff reporter.

Moore said Croom "had an outstanding interview . . . but for the situation we were in, we felt Mike Shula was the best choice to get us through the next two, three years and have a long, stable tenure."

Shula is friends with Croom and says Croom since has called to offer support. If his tenure got off to a controversial start--Rev. Jesse Jackson also weighed in--he was determined to put it behind him.

"Everywhere I've been, every job I've had, everything I've ever done, there have always been reasons he got the job," Shula said of his famous lineage. "You get an opportunity, you go 100 percent in trying to make the most of it and not worry about things you can't control."

Shula had to ask himself if he was ready to be a head coach. And when he wasn't sure of the answer, he turned to his father, his older brother David and Perkins, his coach at Alabama.

"How do you know?" Don Shula said. "That's the question I asked [then-Baltimore Colts owner] Carroll Rosenbloom when I was 33 and had never been a head coach. He asked if I was ready and I told him, `The only way you're going to find out is if you hire me.' I guess he sort of liked that answer.

"Mike has a good background, he has been with coaches with outstanding backgrounds. He has had a lot of responsibilities as an assistant coach, and this just elevates that."

Perkins hired Mike Shula for his first NFL job.

"I could tell when he was playing for me at Alabama he would be a coach one day," he said. "He had the perfect demeanor to be a coach.

"He wasn't the greatest athlete in the world, but he played the game with his head in a unique way. I never once remember him doing something he couldn't do, make a throw he couldn't make. That takes a very disciplined player."

But it doesn't make an NFL player.

Coaching, though, was in Shula's blood, and he moved from Tampa to Miami to Chicago, coaching tight ends under Dave Wannstedt from 1993 to 1995.

"We had nine touchdowns in '95," he said.

And he wound up with a promotion, returning to Tampa Bay as Tony Dungy's offensive coordinator. The famous Shula name couldn't prevent that move from ending badly--Shula was fired after the Bucs' 11-6 loss to St. Louis in the 1999 NFC championship game.

Painful lesson

"We were two minutes away from the Super Bowl with a rookie quarterback [Shaun King], and two weeks later we were fired," he said. "I've tried to learn from it and move on."

David Shula, who left coaching for the family restaurant business after an ill-fated stint as Cincinnati's head coach, still burns over the treatment of his brother.

"How disgracefully it was handled by ownership makes me sick to this day," he said. "It showed a total lack of class."

Wannstedt brought Shula back to Miami to coach quarterbacks in the post-Dan Marino era. He may have grown up in Miami, and given his father's legacy, the Shula name always will be connected with the city. But for Mike Shula, Tuscaloosa is home, and that's an advantage.

"The players who go to Alabama go there to play football for the Crimson Tide," said Bill Curry, an ESPN football analyst who was Alabama's coach from 1987-89. "They might or might not like the coach, they may or may not be interested in the academic program. Most go there because they want to become Crimson Tide football players, and that's a huge advantage for any coach. You really have to work hard to screw that up."

Shula retained the entire defensive staff, including veteran coordinator Joe Kines, and all but three members of an offensive staff headed by Dave Rader, who coached him at 'Bama as an aide to Perkins.

"He's a perfect fit," Rader said. "Mike has a tremendous love and genuine pride in being an Alabama alumnus and a football letterman."

Mother's Day decision

Mike and Shari Shula are the parents of 3-year-old Samantha and are expecting their second child next month. They made the decision to take the Alabama job on Mother's Day weekend, which Mike and his father find appropriate.

"He had a special relationship with his mom," Don Shula said. "I saw him play only one game his entire career. But even when she was fighting cancer (to which she succumbed in '91), she still managed to be at all his games."